Stories From
The Field

Ask people to lead others through transformation before they've examined what they're holding onto themselves, and something doesn't hold. That was the starting point for this work, a global pharmaceutical company in the middle of a significant ownership shift, whose internal change coaches were expected to guide the organisation forward.

I worked with the coaches on the patterns and stories, often long-held, that were shaping how they led, and what they unconsciously believed was possible. The cohort that emerged from this process was more honest, more grounded, and more capable of meeting others' resistance with real understanding, because they had met their own.

Most organisations know what it feels like when values are handed down from above. They look good on walls. They rarely change much.

When a leading Nordic technology company set out to shift how it worked, the design question we kept returning to was: how do you create the conditions for principles to emerge from within, rather than be imposed from above? The result was a foundation for culture change that people owned, because they had built it themselves.

This is one of the beliefs I keep coming back to in my work, and it was the animating idea behind a nine-month development programme for three hundred senior partners at a leading management consultancy, built around the Immunity to Change framework.

What emerged was more than sharper consulting practice. It was a community of people who had a more honest relationship with their own edges, and who could therefore sit with clients in the hardest moments of change with something closer to genuine understanding.

Six hundred leaders. Cohorts of sixty. The Danish landscape as classroom. This was one of the most ambitious leadership initiatives I have been part of, reaching the top of a global pharmaceutical company at a moment when complexity was outpacing leadership capacity.

The programme combined personal leadership aspiration, Immunity to Change, and the formation of ongoing leadership circles, ensuring development continued long after the programme ended.

Not all development happens in a workshop. For a global MedTech company, I worked across several formats — a keynote, a series of leadership podcasts, and a two-day offsite for ninety country leaders — to reach a dispersed, busy leadership community.

Good design mattered here as much as good content did.